@JoelDerfner Thanks for the dictionary suggestion! I had never heard of it. I would indeed be interested in a pdf copy. My address is [email protected].

Hello!

What dictionary?

@Cerberus See this.

@JoonasIlmavirta Ah, interesting.

Any thoughts on this question?

It has two close votes already. If I didn't have a mod hammer I might VTC this as primarily opinion based, but I'm not sure that it's all that different from the examples given in this meta post.

@Nathaniel It's not my favourite question, but I'd say keep it.

It is related to Latin, and an answer is possible.

I don't think it is necessarily based on opinions.

@Cerberus Okay, fair enough. It didn't seem qualitatively different from the others we've had, but with so few active close voters now, two is practically a consensus :)

@JoelDerfner Providing material that (likely) infringes copyright is generally frowned upon across the SE network, not only for legal reasons, but also because it's simply unprofessional.

@JoonasIlmavirta You could buy a used copy for $2.12 (+shipping). (You can search sites from around the world with shipping to Finland on bookfinder.com, for example.)

@Nathaniel Hah!

@Earthliŋ Hi!

First, you don't know that it violates copyright. Second, many people are against the use of copyright in academia. Third, some people are really poor. Fourth, he may be able to access the work through his university's VPN anyway, so he is already "entitled" to reading it. Just some example arguments against chiding others about copyright.

This isn't meant as an attack: just to err relativise the issue.

Even if we ignore the legal/moral issues, I think the edit itself was a good one, if only because answers are meant to be helpful to all readers, present and future. Many of them can't get into chat (not enough rep), and Joel will eventually not be available in chat (hopefully not for many decades!)

Although I don't think I would have agreed with that edit, I understand your argument.

I hadn't seen the edit.

I don't think either Joel or Joonas will care.

I think it's a good edit, actually. It doesn't provide further insight into the question at hand, and it's essentially a personal communication within what is supposed to be universally directed.

My general position is to disapprove of copyright in academia and to respect it in other fields—in fact I don't buy used copies of books that are in print—but I understand that views vary on the subject and I have no wish to impose my opinion on the site.

@Nathaniel As far as LePressentiment's question, I was one of the close votes—I remembered our decision that questions on the evolution of language into Latin was on topic but evolution of Latin into other languages was off.

I'm sort of bemused by LePressentiment's questions in general—they generally seem to ask not for opinion but for interpretation—on the one hand they're not exactly off-topic, but to me they seem out of place somehow. I could be wrong. I also just feel bad for him/her that they tend not to get answers.

@JoelDerfner Fair enough.

I didn't think you minded.

@JoelDerfner They are indeed about interpretation, and sometimes a bit vague. But I still think they're potentially interesting enough (depends on the etymology) and they are about Latin...

@Earthliŋ Wait, what are the congratulations for? Are we celebrating something?

@Cerberus If the book is freely available as PDF, then a link to the publisher/author's website would be more appropriate, I think.

@JoelDerfner We have moderators =)

Ah, yes! Congratulations indeed, @Cerberus!

@JoelDerfner I didn't mean to sound mean, btw., which is why I left it in chat rather than as a comment on main.

@Earthliŋ No problem—and I appreciate the sensitivity to my feelings. :)

I'm very happy with all of your answers, I just thought it didn't belong on the main site and wasn't adding anything to your answer, so I removed it. If people informally exchange infos in chat, I don't mind.

That said, I actually have no idea how Latin academics handle copyright issues in general...

No, I think you're right—it doesn't add anything to the answer, and I considered mentioning it in chat instead—I left it in the answer bc @JoonasIlmavirta doesn't often join us here, so I wasn't sure he'd see it.

The academics I know are all anti-copyright for academic works, but that doesn't mean there aren't folks who think differently or that J.N. Adams, author of Latin Sexual Vocabulary, agrees. :)

@JoonasIlmavirta I've sent it to you via hightail.com (the file is too big to email). It's not really a dictionary so much as a scholarly treatment, but it ultimately gives you the meanings of the words.

@Earthliŋ If I end up having a real long-term need for such a dictionary (which I hope not to happen), I will buy a printed copy. For satisfying my occasional curiosity, a pdf file is much more suitable. A free online resource would have been great (not only for copyright reasons), but if I had restricted my question to those I might never have learned about the book Joel mentions.

@JoelDerfner I only started using SE chat about a week ago or so. It suited my desire to be there building a Latin.SE community, so I decided to give it a try.

@JoelDerfner I got the file, thanks!

@Cerberus I did care: The edit improved the answer. I appreciate the private note Joel gave but it didn't really belong there.

@Nathaniel I'm not a huge fan of my question, but I certainly want to keep my mod hammer from closing it.

As a general rule, I would prefer to allow many kinds of questions. If the current users don't love it, maybe some future users will. We really need to have more questions to make our site a bigger target for search engines and potential users browsing question lists.

I would have liked to be here for the chat you guys had, but I had a formal dinner to attend. (In fact, I still have my dark suit on and I don't recall having chatted in this attire before.)

It seems to me that we have a sufficient consensus on our scope. Should we go ahead and make the edits and remove featuring from the meta post? Or should we wait a bit more?

@JoelDerfner If you ping me in this chat, I will see it, no matter how long since I was here last.

@JoonasIlmavirta I don't understand featuring, so whatever other folks say about the scope is fine by me.

@JoelDerfner Featuring makes the meta post visible on main. The box titled "Featured on meta" shows exactly those meta questions that have the tag "featured". Featuring is a tool to attract community attention to a meta question.

Let's wait and see what others have to say on the scope. Or more properly, on waiting for a consensus about the scope.

@JoonasIlmavirta Ah, so it's featured not on all SE sites—we're just alerting folks on Latin.SE who may not check meta regularly that there are a couple questions they might want to take a look at? If that's the case, then what do people think of featuring the question about asking a question about resource questions? :)

@JoelDerfner Yes, that's what featuring does. Asking about the site scope is a very important question, so it needed to be featured. The resource question is less important, and I'd say we leave that unfeatured. I don't want to feature all reasonable meta questions.

Suggestion: We do not feature the question "How to list resources?". We do what Joel's answer there suggests and create a meta post asking for resource questions to be implemented on main. We feature this new question to let everyone decide on the most important types of resources.

Ah, yes, that's what I meant. I was simply too delighted with the "question about the question about the question" part of what I was saying to realize that it wasn't actually what I was talking about.

Ah, so that question was not the question in question.

HA!

Yes.

There are two votes for my suggestion as opposed to one for each of the other two. The authors of the other two have both commented that my suggestion (really @RobertCarfaino's suggestion) seems workable. Should I go ahead and post the question my suggestion suggests?

I say yes, but I prefer you wait for at least one more opinion here before posting it.

Sounds good. Okay, I'm on my way out. Vale/te!

Optime vale!

@JoonasIlmavirta OK perfect!

@Earthliŋ Or just a mention of the author and title.

And thank you!